Search

Government enforced restrictions on movement during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have had profound impacts on the daily behaviours of many individuals, including physical activity (PA). Given the associations between PA and other health behaviours, changes in PA during the pandemic may have been detrimental for other health behaviours. This study aimed to evaluate whether changes in PA during and after the first national lockdown in the United Kingdom (UK) were associated with concurrent changes in alcohol consumption, sleep, nutrition quality, diet quantity and sedentary time. Data were derived from the UCL COVID-19 Social Study, in which 52,784 adults were followed weekly across 22 weeks of the pandemic from 23rd March to 23rd August 2020. Fixed effects regression models showed that greater PA was positively associated with improved sleep and nutrition quality. However, increases in PA also showed modest associations with increased alcohol consumption and sedentary time. Encouraging people to engage in PA may lead to wider changes in other health behaviours in times of adversity. These associations could be a result of increases in available leisure time for many people during COVID-19 restrictions and are of ongoing importance given the emerging long-term changes to lifestyle and working patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Cognitive theories suggest people with depression interpret self-referential social information negatively. However, it is unclear whether these biases precede or follow depression. We investigated whether facial expression recognition was associated with depressive symptoms cross-sectionally and longitudinally.Methods: Prospective cohort study of people who had visited UK primary care in the past year reporting depressive symptoms (n = 509). Depressive symptoms were measured using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) at four time-points, 2 weeks apart. A computerised task assessed happy and sad facial expression recognition at three time-points (n = 505 at time 1). The unbiased hit rate measured ability to recognise emotions accounting for any general tendency to identify the emotion when it was not present.Results: The sample included the full range of depressive symptom severity, with 45% meeting diagnostic criteria for depression. There was no evidence that happy or sad unbiased hit rates were associated with concurrent or subsequent depressive symptoms. There was weak evidence that, for every additional face incorrectly classified as happy, concurrent PHQ-9 scores reduced by 0.05 of a point (95% CI = -0.10 to 0.002, p = 0.06 after adjustment for confounders). This association was strongest for more ambiguous facial expressions (interaction term p<0.001).Limitations: This was an observational study with relatively short follow-up (6 weeks) and small changes in depressive symptoms and emotion recognition. Only 7% of invited patients consented to participate.Conclusions: Reduced misclassifications of ambiguous faces as happy could be a state marker of depression, but was not associated with subsequent depressive symptoms. Future research should focus on the interpretation of ambiguous social information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]